Legislatures in Evolution presents a series of essays on evolution and change in the legislative context. They cover a wide range of topics, including both proposed and implemented reforms. The contributions included here discuss parliamentarians' attitude toward party discipline; the specific challenges associated with implementing sexual harassment policies within legislatures; the consequences of the Supreme Court's ruling in Mikisew Cree First Nation v. Canada on the government's duty to consult Indigenous Peoples when drafting legislation; parliamentarians' engagement in budgetary control issues; the reform of the rules governing prayers in the Legislature of British Columbia; and time management reforms in the Legislative Assembly of Yukon. Charles Feldman, Genevieve Tellier, David Groves, and their contributors bring together both practical and academic experience and perspectives. They conclude with an analysis of parliamentary reforms, paying particular attention to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the functioning of legislatures.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. In Canada many public projects, programs, and services perform well, and many are very successful. However, these cases are consistently underexposed and understudied in the policy literature which, for various reasons, tends to focus on policy mistakes and learning from failures rather than successes. In fact, studies of public policy successes are rare not just in Canada, but the world over, although this has started to change (McConnell, 2010, 2017; Compton & 't Hart, 2019; Luetjens, Mintrom & 't Hart, 2019). Like those publications, the aims of Policy Success in Canada are to see, describe, acknowledge, and promote learning from past and present instances of highly effective and highly valued public policymaking. This exercise will be done through detailed examination of selected case studies of policy success in different eras, governments, and policy domains in Canada. This book project is embedded in a broader project led by 't Hart and OUP exploring policy successes globally and regionally. It is envisaged as a companion volume to OUP's 2019 offering Great Policy Successes (Compton and 't Hart, 2019) and to Successful Public Policy in the Nordic Countries (de La Porte et al, 2022). This present volume provides an opportunity to analyze what is similar and distinctive about introducing and implementing successful public policy in one of the world's most politically decentralized and regionally diverse federation and oldest democratic polities.

Broken down into five sections explaining how public budgets are developed, Canadian Public Finance presents a comprehensive account of the budget process of the federal, provincial, and territorial governments. With a specific focus on the public policy process, Genevieve Tellier walks readers through the five steps involved in the budget process including agenda-setting, formulation, adoption, implementation, and evaluation. Taking a close look at how much influence key decision-makers actually have over the budget process, Tellier highlights recent events that reveal the political, social, and economic constraints that impact budgetary decisions. Tellier uses key words and textboxes at the end of each chapter to reflect on current issues and new developments in the world of public finance, such as gender-sensitive budgets, performance-based budgeting, and fiscal transparency.